Performing ‘Badly’ Curating in Feminst Thought Performing Feminism ‘Badly’: Hotham Street Ladies and Brown Council Laura Castagnini

Women’s Art Movement? Why might contemporary feminist artists work collaboratively, use domestic techniques and materials and, in doing so, appropriate second wave feminist methodologies? Finally, what’s so funny about this approach?

I will suggest that the humorous and revisionist tendencies evident in You Beaut! can be characterised as ‘parafeminist parody’. Situated within the post- 2000s resurgence of interest in feminism worldwide, parafeminist parody refers to the current trend in contemporary to mimic or cite aspects of earlier feminist practices. Parafeminist parody is an interpretation of art theorist Amelia Jones’ concep- tual framework of “parafeminism” read through the lens of Linda Hutcheon’s revised theory of parody, and intends to explicate the forms of humour cur- rently emerging in contemporary practices such as the Hotham Street Ladies.

The term parafeminism, first articulated in Jones’s groundbreaking book Self/Image (2006), uses 1 the prefix “para” to denote a model of contemporary art practice that runs “parallel to,” rather than “post,” If you needed to pop to the loo during my earlier forms of feminism: it is “a conceptual model of curated exhibition Backflip: Feminism and Humour in critique and exploration that is simultaneously parallel Contemporary Art, you would have stumbled across a to and building on (in the sense of rethinking and cake-frosted uterus spurting sugary menstrual blood pushing the boundaries of, but not superseding) all over the gallery toilet floor.1 The gooey site-specific earlier .”2 It characterises an intersectional installation, entitled You Beaut! (2013), was the handi- form of feminist art practice that refutes coalitional work of Melbourne art collective the Hotham Street identity politics and adopts a “rethinking” and expan- Ladies and created entirely from edible cake decora- sion of second wave feminist methodologies.3 tions, including icing sugar, sprinkles and raspberry Another aspect of parafeminism is that it belies con- lollies (for the... err... clots). As well as rendering Mar- flicting attitudes and proximities to feminism: to use garet Lawrence Gallery’s bathroom inoperative for Jones’ words, it “embrace(s)” the confusion of “the the show’s duration, You Beaut! provoked a series of meaning, significance, and status of feminist—or interrelated questions that I would like to explore in parafeminist—visual practice today.”4 this article. What does it mean for female artists to insert menstrual blood—the female grotesque par I would like to further Jones’ theory of excellence—into the gallery more than four decades parafeminism by arguing there is parodic potential in after the emergence of such subject matter in the its historical homage, when read through the lens of

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Hutcheon’s theory of parody. Hutcheon differentiates second wave strategies of the 1970s and, as will be parody from satire: a form of humour which, she later discussed, inversion of the 1990s Bad Girls phe- argues, is always mocking, while parody’s definition nomena. includes works that mimic, refer or pay homage In this way, parafeminism enables contempo- through their utilisation of irony which “can be playful rary feminist practitioners such as Hotham Street instead of belittling.”5 The etymological root of the Ladies to own and build upon the history of feminist prefix ‘para,’ which is shared by parafeminism and art through parodic strategies of homage and cita- parody, provides the foundation for Hutcheon’s the- tion. ory. She argues:

The prefix para has two meanings, only one of which is usually mentioned – that of “counter” or “against”… However para in Greek can also mean beside, and therefore there is a sugges- tion of an accord or intimacy instead of a con- trast.6

The doubleness of parody’s root ‘para’ leads Hutcheon to a new definition of parody which, I suggest, is particularly relevant to parafeminism: 2 Parody… is repetition with difference. A critical distance is implied between the background Rethinking Earlier Feminisms text being parodied and the new incorporating Parafeminist parody reveals itself in the work of work, a distance usually signalled by irony. But the Hotham Street Ladies (HSL): Cassandra Chilton, this irony can be playful instead of belittling: it Molly O’Shaughnessy, Sarah Parkes, Caroline Price, can be critically constructive as well as destruc- and Lyndal Walker. The collective, all of whom lived at tive. The pleasure of parody’s irony comes not one time in a Melbourne share house in Hotham from humor in particular but from the degree Street in Collingwood, cite their inspiration as “groups of engagement of the reader in the intertextual such as mother’s auxiliaries and the Country Wom- “bouncing” (to use E.M Forster’s famous term) en’s Association. They also come together out of between complicity and distance.7 necessity to make things for the enjoyment of their community and for the enrichment of girly chat.”9 While Hutcheon’s insights broaden the term HSL pay homage to women’s collectives of the past parody to include “beside”, and thus account for through their titling as “ladies”, their celebration of strategies of complicity and homage, I reverse Hutch- female friendship, and enjoyment of traditional eon’s logic to argue that parafeminism can be domestic activities of baking, cake decorating and expanded to include the term “counter”, and thus craft. However, HSL’s practice exploits the grotesque account for strategies of distance and critique. This elements of food and share-household living to pres- methodology elucidates two important elements of ent incongruities between ideals of femininity and the parafeminism: firstly, Hutcheon’s insights convey that Ladies’ lived experience as women today. the term parafeminism etymologically has two con- tradictory meanings pertaining to complicity and HSL’s first collective effort was The HSL Contri- distance. Thereby, I extend Jones’ theory to ascertain bution Cookery Book (2004), a community recipe book, that parodic pleasure in reading parafeminist prac- after which their work has traversed a broad range of tices is produced by the viewers’ engagement in materials and contexts including: Hotham Street House “bouncing” between complicity and distance.8 Cake (2008), a cake creation of the original share- house exhibited in a gallery; Frosting, (2008–), an Secondly, I argue that the parafeminist strategy ongoing series of street art rendered in icing; Green of “rethinking” earlier forms of feminism can be read, Bin (2011), an oversized public sculpture of a recycling through Hutcheon’s theory, as a parody of the past. bin; and their most ambitious project to date, At Thus contemporary feminist art—or parafeminist Home with the Hotham Street Ladies (2013), an installa- art—can be considered as a temporal parody of previ- tion that transformed the foyer of the National Gal- ous “waves” of feminism: embodying both homage to lery of Victoria into two comically messy domestic

109 Issue 29 / May 2016 Performing Feminism ‘Badly’ Curating in Feminst Thought living spaces meticulously crafted through cake deco- lated by societal norms, and the subsequent failure to ration. HSL’s representation of the abject—food, mess, conform. At the same time, however, the cakes are and bodily functions—is offset by their skilful mimicry meticulously detailed and demonstrate enormous of middle-class femininity through craft and baking technical skill: suggesting a sincere celebration of the techniques. women’s work displayed at the Royal Melbourne Show. Further, HSL pay tribute to female characters and artists, thus remixing and presenting them in divergent cultural contexts. Therefore a dialectic of critique and homage operates within HSL’s parodic performance, demonstrating Hutcheon’s argument that parody can include “critically constructive” strat- egies of homage.13 The cakes demonstrate comic theorist Simon Dentith’s argument that within parody “the polemic can work both ways: towards the imi- tated text or towards the ‘world.’”14 Thus, to use Dentith’s logic, HSL draw on the authority of precur- sor texts (the cake contest, the novel, the singer) to attack and satirise elements of the broader “world” (gender stereotypes).15 I want to characterise the dialectic between critique and celebration of women’s work that emerges in HSL’s work as a distinct strategy 3 of parafeminist parody that relates to its “rethinking” of earlier feminist histories. However, before we can For three years in a row, from 2009-2012, HSL answer the questions posed at the beginning of this submitted absurd entries to the Royal Melbourne article in relation to HSL’s installation You Beaut! Show Cake Decorating competition. Their first effort (2013), the performative element of this temporal was Pizza Cake (2009): a crude cake creation that parody needs to be further elucidated. To this end, I depicted two pizza boxes emblazoned with a HSL will draw upon the work of another Australian femi- emblem as well as half eaten crusts, an ashtray, and a nist art collective who combine cake and collectivism remote control. They didn’t win, but the following to restage earlier feminist histories. year the collective offered Miss Havisham Cake (2010) for the contest: a destroyed three tiered wedding cake which included fake mice scampering through- out detritus of broken columns and a missing plastic groom that was inspired by the unhinged female character in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Much to the artists’ amusement, the second cake was dis- qualified for being “in bad taste.”10 The judges’ com- ments read: “Be aware that the exhibit is in bad taste. You are presenting something that is food-based and should be pleasing to the eye. A nice idea but not 4 suited for a major competition.”11 In response, in 2011 HSL presented Amy Varden (2011), a cake that Performing “Badly” depicted the recently deceased pop singer Amy Wine- Brown Council’s work responds to the physical house. and historical context of performance to “critique why and how it is that we perform”,16 according to the HSL’s cake contest performance enacts parody artists. Brown Council’s members—Frances Barrett, on a number of levels: it mocks the notion of compe- Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith—met tition based on women’s domestic prowess through during their studies at College of Fine Art (COFA), a presentation of crude imagery in a medium that, Sydney art school known for its ability to operate at according to the judges, “should be pleasing to the the nexus of performance and visual art, and their eye.”12 The subversive element of these works relies collaborative work continues to straddle gallery and on the mimesis of a constructed femininity, based on stage contexts. Often combining absurd humour with the view that gender is instilled by behaviours regu- temporal citation, Brown Council’s work operates as a

110 Issue 29 / May 2016 Performing Feminism ‘Badly’ Curating in Feminst Thought multi-directional parody that I characterise as explic- parafeminist lens: a blend of self-conscious failure and itly parafeminist. Through analysis of their oeuvre, I irony that results in a parody of comedy itself. ask: how does parafeminist parody operate when its restaging of the past is considered a deliberately “bad” performance?

Brown Council’s early video works exaggerated elements of sexist popular culture to create grotesque presentations of its members’ exhausted bodies through durational performances. Milkshake (2007) depicts the artists, who are wearing homemade skele- ton suits, drinking one litre of milk before attempting an energetic choreographed dance routine to Kelis’ 5 song “Milkshakes.” Similarly, Runaway (2008) presents a female figure (played by all four artists interchange- More recently, Brown Council have turned ably) running towards the camera in slow motion. The their attention to the legacy of their preferred dramatic soundtrack builds tension, lights flash onto medium: durational performance. These works inves- her face and body, until suddenly the protagonist is tigate the idea of “the artist” as well as the construc- squirted with (fake) blood and climactically rips off tion of performance and art histories, including, of her singlet to expose a tan-coloured t-shirt with huge course, earlier forms of feminism. This interest is breasts drawn in black marker. From these early exemplified in works such as Dance Work (2009), in works, Brown Council undertook an intensive period which Brown Council hired a dancer to perform a of research into the form and functions of comedy striptease at an exhibition opening; Photo with the itself. They developed a four-hour live performance, A Artist (2011), in which the public were invited to buy a Comedy (2010), in which the artists interrogate power photo of themselves with the four artists outside the dynamics in performance by placing themselves at the Museum of Contemporary Art; Performance Fee mercy of the audience; Big Show (2009), a video which (2012), in which the collective sat blindfolded in documents the artists’ durational performance of Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art and sold kisses clichéd comedic gags; and One Hour Laugh (2009), in for $2; and the ongoing project, Remembering Barbara which the artists filmed themselves laughing continu- Cleveland (2011-), in which Brown Council honour the ously for one hour.17 In all three performance-based life and work of a fictive 1970s Australian female works, the members of Brown Council sport a cos- performance artist named Barbara Cleveland.20 Such tume of dunce hats and bibs hand-crafted from pri- works operate to deconstruct the conditions—finan- mary-coloured paper. This DIY style of costume, cial, symbolic, and gendered—of performance. How- which reappears throughout Brown Council’s early ever, they also borrow from the aesthetics of early works, takes pleasure in sabotaging the markers of feminist practices (black and white footage), specific quality and taste that uphold discourses of “high art”. artworks (Orlan’s 1977 performance The Artist’s Kiss), Thus, I would suggest, these Brown Council works and key figures (the popularity of the name “Barbara” revel in “the queer art of failure”, theorised by Judith in an earlier generation of feminists in Australia: Bar- (or Jack) Halberstam as the subversive potential that bara Campbell, Barbara Hall, Barbara Creed, Barbara lies in resisting markers of “success” in a capitalist and Bolt). Citation escalates into parody in the endurance patriarchal society.18 Failure is a strategy that circu- performance video Work in Progress: Dawn to Dusk lates through the work, often to grotesquely comic (2010), in which the four artists, dressed in blue over- potential: the Milkshakes performance is disrupted by alls, silently hammer a wooden post into the ground bumps and cramps, the jokes told in A Comedy are for sixteen hours. As the critic Pip Wallis noted: “With often terribly bad, and the endurance tasks set in Big tongue-in-cheek humour, Dawn to Dusk references Show result in retching, pain, and boredom. In their performance art and its intertwined history with emphasis on bodily functions, Brown Council image feminist art of the 1960s and 70s.”21 That is to say, what literary theorist Mary Russo termed “the female Work in Progress: Dawn to Dusk cites the aesthetics of grotesque”: using laughter, to borrow Russo’s phrase, feminist art history through their employment of as a strategy to “expose and subvert the impasse of durational performance, grainy grey-scale footage femininity.”19 However, unlike their “bad girl” feminist and costuming, but filters their homage through an predecessors of the 1980s and early 1990s, Brown added layer of absurdity: a “repetition with critical Council filter the female grotesque through a distance” that challenges the accomplishment of

111 Issue 29 / May 2016 Performing Feminism ‘Badly’ Curating in Feminst Thought women’s labour rights. Through their aesthetic hom- through the insights of Glass, Richards argues: “Their age and conceptual critique of earlier forms of femi- collective sidelong glances, quotations, nods, random nism, Brown Council’s work presents a dialectic of encounters or riffs on the multi-layered histories of proximity and distance to history that is intrinsic to the body and the performative in art history gives my notion of parafeminist parody. presence to the past, reimagining the terrain for new parallels.”26 Australian feminist art historian Catriona Moore cited Work in Progress: Dawn to Dusk as an example of contemporary artists “performing femi- nism badly”. In a brief talk at the LEVEL ARI sympo- sium in Brisbane, Moore argued: “Today I see in a lot of contemporary practice feminism being performed in very funny ways, sometimes being performed badly.”22 Moore has questioned the aesthetic and conceptual purchase of such an approach, most recently in her essay “, Then and Now” (2013), Moore writes: Then, as now, feminist artists do not feel com- fortable with any set formal or stylistic lexi- con. Hipster feminism instead cheerfully embroiders, playfully unravels or badly per- forms the baser depths of feminine sensibility. Maybe this is another case of strategic essen- tialism, in this case feminist aesthetics, turned inside out and replayed in decadent, camp and 6 provocative form.23 I suggest that, to use Moore’s words, “perform- In her attempt to theorise the aesthetic pro- ing feminism, and performing it badly”,27 might be a ductivity of feminist revisionism, Moore barely hides productive way to consider the emergent strategies of her disappointment in mourning the loss of the politi- historical revisionism and aesthetic citation that I am cal potency of earlier practices.24 In this, she echoes characterising as parafeminist parody. As a case study, an argument made by Amelia Jones in her article let us consider the live performance Mass Action: 137 “1970/2007: The Return of Feminist Art”: Cakes in 90 Hours (2012), in which Brown Council “Recent practices seem to appropriate strategies undertook a 90-hour “bake off” in the headquarters from earlier feminisms without sustaining the of Sydney’s Country Women’s Association (CWA). politics these strategies aimed at promoting. CWA is the largest women’s organisation in Australia, And the strategies are replicated either without known for its support of rural women through fund- knowing of the earlier models or by knowingly raising activities such as the Country Classics Cook- repeating them, but in new contexts in which book series and female-only hostel accommodation in they do not have the same political effect.” major cities, and is tied to a particular generation of predominantly white middle-class women’s However, other critics have argued that con- Anglo-Christian values of respectability and goodwill. temporary mimicry of earlier feminist aesthetics Brown Council’s durational performance saw the could potentially function as gateway drug to feminist artists attempt to cook every recipe in CWA’s Country politics. In her oft-cited essay “Extimacy: A New Classics Cookbook without stopping for three days, Generation of Feminism” (2009), the critic Alexie while the action was broadcast on the internet Glass writes: “In recent practice feminism is often through a live video feed and updates by invited blog- claimed as a site of discourse which has become gers. Thereafter, the artists offered the cakes to a actively recharged via appropriations of feminist visual judging panel and held an afternoon tea for CWA language.”25 This “recharging” of feminism through members.28 By exaggerating the CWA’s mission artistic appropriation simultaneously gives weight to through repetition and exhaustive performance, history, as Bree Richards argues in her article “Doing, Brown Council’s premise illustrates Hutcheon’s notion Being, Performing”. Reviewing the “resurgence” of of parody as “repetition with critical distance”. performance art by women artists in Australia,

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However, the titling and promotion of Mass discourses of gender and performance allowed a Action denotes the performance as a protest. Brown previous generation of feminists to understand the Council’s grey-scale publicity shot clearly channels the way that systems of labour and value influence the aesthetic of 1970s feminist protest actions, depicting codification and regulation of women’s bodies accord- the serious-faced, overalls-clad collective marching in ing to ,34 as well as to rework models of the streets carrying a placard with the text “Mass female desire and pleasure towards inter-subjective Action”. Historically, feminist protests usually involved forms of exchange.35 Thus works by Baker, the Wait- withdrawing from domestic work; however, Brown resses, Ely, and others, functioned to simultaneously Council inverted this logic by doggedly baking an celebrate women’s work and critique the subjection enormous amount of cakes. Brown Council’s refusal of women through domestic roles, while relishing in to present a clear-sighted target for their Mass Action the corporeal pleasure of grotesque food behaviours. protest reflects strategies of broader political move- ments such as Occupy, whose open-ended agenda By re-presenting these second wave strategies has been praised by critics as resistance to its conclu- in the 2010s, Brown Council and the Hotham Street sion, and presents issues of women’s labour as an Ladies are part of a new generation of feminist artists ongoing and multifarious battle.29 Thus, in its simul- employing strategies of parody as defined by Hutch- taneous functions of feminist critique and celebration eon: they possess a “critical distance” to their prede- of women’s work, Mass Action exemplifies the broad cessors and are “repeating with difference” earlier range of parody articulated by Hutcheon’s definition: feminist agendas.36 Such work demonstrates not only including works that mimic, refer or pay homage contemporary artists’ continued commitment to through their utilisation of irony which “can be playful addressing gender inequality but also their subtle instead of belittling”.30 homage to earlier feminist artists through parafemi- nist “rethinking” and extension of earlier strategies: Brown Council’s restaging of earlier strategies thus their presentation of a simultaneous proximity of feminism, or to use Moore’s phrase, “performing and distance to history that shifts the terrain of femi- feminism, and performing it badly”,31 presents a nism towards new dimensions of practice.37 I suggest parafeminist “rethinking”32 of durational performance this strategy is the defining feature of our contempo- and women’s histories and thus operates as a parody rary moment in feminist art history. of second wave feminist methodologies. This tempo- ral parody, I argue, is politically and aesthetically pro- In this article I have focussed on the work of ductive in reimagining new terrain for (para)feminist Brown Council and Hotham Street Ladies, however practice. my argument could be easily extended to a number of Australian feminist artists including Catherine Bell, Coming to Terms with the Weight of the Past Emily Floyd, Danielle Hakim, Alice Lang, Eugenia Lim, As I have examined in this article, both Brown Hannah Raisin, Salote Tawale, Inez de Vega, and Council and Hotham Street Ladies have made perfor- Kalinda Vary, among many others. I suggest that the mance-based work that utilises domestic strategies of citational and historicising project of these parafemi- food preparation to enact various types of feminist nist practices allows the corporeal preoccupations of critique and homage: of femininity, women’s work, live and video art to be restaged: both more proxi- and the politics and practices of an earlier generation mally and playfully, and at a distance from, the explicit of feminist performance artists that includes Barbara politics of the past. At the same time, parafeminist Campbell, Lyndal Jones, Bonita Ely, and Joan parody can be considered a parodic inversion of the Grounds. Indeed, the feminist strategy of performing 1990s Bad Girls phenomenon, which disassociated with domestic materials to render the female gro- humorous forms of gender-based practice from their tesque, shared by the artists I have selected for analy- feminist predecessors, since contemporary artists are sis, was developed in the 1970s; notable perfor- including homage as a central element of their sub- mances include Bobby Baker’s invitation for audiences versive feminist humour. The pleasure produced in to eat life-sized cake versions of her family members such parafeminist practices demonstrates the value of in The Edible Family (1976), the Waitresses’ perfor- parafeminist parody to a new generation of feminist mance of a many-breasted torso waitress The Great artists, enabling them to assess both the gains and Goddess Diana (1978), and Bonita Ely’s cooking losses of their foremothers and, in doing so, negotiate demonstration Murray River Punch (1980) in which she new possibilities for feminist practices and ideology. served “punch” with ingredients of pollutants in Aus- Hutcheon suggests the “critical distance” that enables tralia’s Murray River.33 The interjection of food into parody is usually presented through irony, however:

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“Irony functions, therefore, as both antiphrasis and as 3 Hotham Street Ladies, Miss Havisham Cake an evaluative strategy.”38 Therein, I read contemporary (2010), entered in 2010 Royal Melbourne Show cake feminist art as a parody of earlier forms of feminism, contest. with the “critical distance” between the text being 4 Brown Council, Work in Progress: Dawn to Dusk parodied and the new, incorporating, work signalled (2010), HD video, 8:51 mins. by an irony that is both critical and evaluative. 5 Brown Council, One Hour Laugh (2009), HD video, 60 mins. To conclude, I will return to the delightfully 6 Brown Council, Mass Action: 137 Cakes in 90 disgusting work mentioned in the introduction to this Hours (2012), promotional image. article, You Beaut! (2013). I began with this artwork to open up questions about humour in contemporary feminist art and the associated strategies of parody Notes and historical homage, and I asked more specifically 1 Laura Castagnini, ed., Backflip: Feminism and what kinds of conclusions can be drawn when artists Humour in Contemporary Art, Margaret Lawrence render abject female bodily fluid in a medium usually Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts, University of reserved for domestic pleasantries. From the outset, Melbourne, Melbourne, 2013. HSL’s presentation of menstrual blood as feminist 2 Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Represen- subject matter demonstrates the continued con- tation, and the Contemporary Subject, Routledge straints and expectations that surround women’s London and New York, 2006, p. 213. bodies. However, it further recalls the centrality of 3 Ibid. this subject matter in feminist exhibitions of the 4 Ibid., 217. 1970s.39 The Ladies’ rendering of female bodily fluid 5 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: Teachings through cake decoration (itself a parody of another of Twentieth Century Art Forms, Methuen, New York, second wave methodology) exaggerates the work’s 1985, p. 32. feminist politic to the point of exaggerated cliché. 6 Ibid. Through the insights developed in this article, I pro- 7 Ibid. pose that You Beaut! parodies the very notion of a 8 Ibid. feminist exhibition: both the predictability of feminist 9 The Hotham Street Ladies, see http://www. art conventions as well as their continued relevance hothamstreetladies.com. after forty years. It revels in menstrual blood, paro- 10 Ibid. dies (both in the sense of critique and celebration) 11 Undecipherable author, “Royal Melbourne women’s work, and delights in the viewer’s shock; and Show judging comments: Hotham Street Ladies,” in doing so, it laughs at how very clichéd this perfor- September 9, 2010. Original scanned and emailed to mance is. At its critical peak, this multi-layered parody the author by Lyndal Walker, February 15, 2014. asks of feminism: how far have we really come? Thus, 12 Ibid You Beaut! instantiates Hutcheon’s claim that parody 13 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (1985), is “one of the ways in which modern artists have p. 32. managed to come to terms with the weight of the 14 Simon Dentith, Parody, Routledge, London past.”40 and New York, 2000, p. 17. 15 Ibid. 16 Brown Council website: http://browncoun- This article was first published in n.paradoxa: cil.com/about international feminist art journal, No. 36, July 2015, 17 For more on this body of work, see Anneke Humour, pp. 23-31. Jaspers, “Brown Council: Critical Comedy,” Runway, 18 (2011); Megan Garrett-Jones, “Just for Laughs: Brown Council’s A Comedy,” Das 500, published Captions September 3, 2010, http://www.dasplatforms.com/ 1 Hotham Street Ladies, You Beaut! (2013), writing/just-for-laughs-brown-councils-a-comedy site-specific installation for Backflip: Feminism and 18 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, Humour in Contemporary Art, Margaret Lawrence Duke University Press, Durham, 2011. Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne 19 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, 2 Hotham Street Ladies, At Home with the Excess, and Modernity, Routledge, New York and Hotham Street Ladies (2013), installation in the foyer of London, 1995, p. 73. Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. 20 The video This is Barbara Cleveland (2013) is

114 Issue 29 / May 2016 Performing Feminism ‘Badly’ Curating in Feminst Thought the latest instalment in the project. 37 Amelia Jones, Self/Image, p. 213. Other local 21 Pip Wallis, “The View From Here: 19 examples of contemporary artists that incorporate Perspectives on Feminism: Exhibition Review,” Next cake into their feminist art are: Madeline Kidd’s Wave Text Camp Reader, Next Wave Festival, Mel- glossy sculptural and painting arrangements; Heide bourne, 2010. Holmes’ video CAKE (2010); Damp’s The Damp Pie 22 Catriona Moore, “Introduction: Performing Chart (2009); and most pertinently Kalinda Vary and Feminisms”, MP3 sound recording, 4:41 mins, from a Ebony Gulliver’s recent performance Food for Thought paper presented at LEVEL - Feminism and Art in 2013 (2014) in which they offered to their audience a Forum at Queensland University of Technology, choice of home-made cakes with satirical names such Brisbane, March 9, 2013, http://www.ciprecinct.qut. as: “The Obedient Wife” (crushed nice biscuits, no edu.au/archive/2013/feminism-art.jsp fillings, just the shell) ; “The Julie Bishop/Margaret 23 Catriona Moore, “The more things change... Thatcher Tart” (Zesty lemon tart in flaky pastry case) feminist aesthetics, then and now,” Artlink, 33.3, and “Pussy Riot Tart- Vladimir Putin with cream on 2013, p. 24. his face” (Caution: Contains unpalatable, indigestible 24 Amelia Jones, “1970/2007: The Return of elements.) Feminist Art,” X-TRA, 10.4, 2008, http://x-traonline. 38 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (1985), org/article/19702007-the-return-of-feminist-art/. p. 53. My emphasis. 25 Alexie Glass, “Extimacy: A new generation 39 For example the Feminist Art Program’s of feminism,” Art & Australia, 47.1, 2009, p. 135. iconic exhibition Womanhouse (1972) which included 26 Bree Richards, “Doing, Being, Performing,” Judy Chicago’s installation Menstruation Bathroom. Performa Magazine, Posted January 24, 2013, http:// 40 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (1985), performamagazine.tumblr.com/post/41227948102/ p. 29. doing-being-performing. My emphasis. 27 Ibid. 28 Documentation can be viewed at the Laura Castagnini is an Australian curator and project’s website: http://browncouncil.com/massac- writer interested in the performance of feminist, queer, and tion/. anticolonial histories. Recent curatorial projects include our 29 Hito Steyerl, “Art as Occupation: Claims for word is our bond (West Space, Melbourne, 2015); Alice an Autonomy of Life”, e-flux, 30.12, 2011, http:// Lang Originals (Sydney College of the Arts, 2014); Back- www.e-flux.com/journal/art-as-occupation-claims- flip: Feminism and Humour in Contemporary Art for-an-autonomy-of-life-12/ (Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2013); and 30 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (1985), Memory Screens (co-curated with Eugenia Lim, Austra- p. 32. lian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2013). As well as in 31 Catriona Moore, “Introduction: Performing numerous exhibition catalogues, her writing has appeared Feminisms” (2013). in Frieze magazine, n.paradoxa: international feminist 32 Amelia Jones, Self/Image, p. 213. art journal, Australian and New Zealand Journal of 33 This strategy is also evident in photography; Art (Routledge), and Artlink journal. She is currently see Lee Miller’s surrealist cakes of the 1960s and Programme Coordinator at Iniva (Institute for International 1970s. Visual Arts) in London, and Secretary of fCu (Feminist 34 Mary Douglas’s work was particularly Curators United). influential in this area; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge, London and New York, 1966. Key exhibi- tions include The D’Oyley Show: An exhibition of Women’s Domestic Needlework (Sydney: Watters Gallery, 1979); Women at Work: A week of Women’s Performance (Melbourne: George Paton Gallery, 1980); and internationally Dirt & Domesticity: Con- structions of the Feminine (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992). 35 Rachel Fensham, “An Appetite for Trapeze,” Performance Research 4.1, 1999, p. 142-50. 36 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (1985), p. 32.

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